How Labour laid down the welcome mat

In 2009, Andrew Neather, a former government adviser and speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said the aim of Labour’s immigration strategy was to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’. He said Labour’s relaxation of immigration controls was a deliberate attempt to engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country and plug gaps in the jobs market.

When Poland and seven other Eastern European countries (known as the EU8) joined the bloc in 2004, the Blair government could have imposed immigration restrictions for the following seven years – so-called transitional arrangements. But they chose not to, instead preferring to believe an academic report that predicted immigration to the UK would increase by between 5,000 and 13,000 a year.

When Mr Blair’s government threw open Britain’s borders, there were fewer than 100,000

workers in the UK from the EU8. By June this year, it had increased more than tenfold.

Last month, the number of Polish citizens living in Britain passed one million for the first time. In 2004, there were only 69,000 residing in the UK. Now they have overtaken Indians, the Irish and former colonies by having the largest foreign community in Britain.

Mr Blair also paved the way for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to come to Britain after transitional arrangements were lifted in January 2014.

In 2004, there were just 12,000 workers here. By this June, there were 362,000 employed in the UK.

Over the same period, the foreign workforce – including individuals from outside the EU – more than doubled. It soared from 2.5million to 5.6million

Secret Cabinet Office papers, uncovered in 2010, revealed Labour threw open the doors to mass migration in a deliberate policy to change the social make-up of the UK.

A draft report showed that ministers wanted to ‘maximise the contribution’ of migrants to their ‘social objectives’. The number of foreigners allowed into the UK increased by as much as 50 per cent in the wake of the review, written in 2000.